The Untold Truth Of Tory Belleci From Mythbusters

Salvatore Paul "Tory" Belleci burst on the entertainment scene as the gung-ho daredevil member of the MythBusters Build Team. Along with his co-hosts Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, he gained fame field-testing the scientific veracity of all sorts of myths and legends until 2014, when the laws of the entertainment industry took their toll and, as Business Insider puts it, the members of Build Team were given their "walking papers." 

Still, while you might mainly know Belleci from MythBusters, it doesn't mean that's all he's been up to. In fact, he was doing awesome stuff well before you knew his face, and he's been up to all sorts of shenanigans since he disappeared from the myth-busting scene. On top of that, he's led a truly interesting life ever since his childhood — a life that's largely taken place away from the brightest limelight. It's high time his tale be told, so this is the untold story of Tory Belleci from MythBusters.

In 2014, Tory Belleci took part in one of the strangest, most Mad Libs moments of his career. According to The Verge, he not only took part in the famed Gumball 3000, a highly exclusive and elaborate 3,000-mile street rally — he did it with Canadian DJ Deadmau5, of all people. Belleci and Deadmau5 drove a "Purrari", a custom Ferrari 458 Italia with a paint job themed after the Nyan Cat meme, complete with speakers that blared its theme song. In fact, Belleci and Deadmau5 say they spent the race listening to the song on repeat.  

While all of this might seem like a strange celebrity stunt — after all, this was the same year Deadmau5 had a new album out, and Belleci and the rest of the Build Team had lost their MythBusters jobs — the two seemed to legitimately enjoy their time on the road. They did suffer the occasional setback, like when the French police banned Deadmau5 from driving in the country, and Belleci had to take the wheel until they reached Spain. Nevertheless, they did well enough on the week-long supercar race that when they reached the goal in Ibiza, they were awarded the biggest award of the entire race: the Spirit of Gumball prize, which is given to the team that was most positive, had the best time, and partied the hardest. 

It's hard to imagine a show with a more inherently and willingly absurd premise than MythBusters, which revolved around absurd myths and urban legends. However, leave it to Tory Belleci to find a way to top that. As Wired tells us, in 2011, the myth-busting rascal found himself hosting a show called Flying Anvils, where the entire premise was to see how high the contestants could send an anvil flying with controlled black powder explosions. What's more, this wasn't just some strange show a drug-fueled TV executive had slapped together as a vehicle to test out Belleci's solo star power. He was actually just a celebrity host for the National Anvil Shooting Championship, an actual redneck sport that Belleci says dates back 200 years. 

If you think that blasting 100-pound anvils 200 feet in the air for sport sounds amazingly dangerous, Belleci certainly agrees with you. Throughout his Wired interview about the show, the man you'd expect to be somewhat jaded after personally testing countless weird myths comes off as totally impressed and intrigued by the weirdness of it all and the dedication of the contestants. According to Belleci, one guy actually (though not particularly shockingly) got injured during the rounds, and then called from the hospital, urging everyone to finish the competition. After the show ended, Belleci said it was "one of the craziest events" that he'd ever witnessed ... and that he couldn't wait to go back next year.

You could say that MythBusters was in the cards for Tory Belleci pretty early on. According to The Good 5 Cent Cigar, Belleci was introduced to fire at a very young age by his father, who taught him how to make a Molotov cocktail. Belleci was still a child when he built a flamethrower that worked so well, he accidentally set a part of the family's house on fire. 

As The Monterey County Herald writes, young Belleci also got into explosives and learned how to make homemade bombs. The final component of good myth-busting — the showmanship element — came when he witnessed his father preparing their house for Halloween. Belleci became so enamored with the creepy decorations that he started making his own. Before long, he had taken over, and the creepy contraptions that he created were so gross and realistic that his dad had to tell him to "cool it." Because of young Tory's propensity for wild special effects setups, it's probably no surprise that Belleci's mother Terrie says of her son's childhood, "Halloween and Fourth of July were my two worst nightmares. He just used to scare me."

These days, Tory Belleci is most famous as a TV personality, but he's also dabbled on the other side of the camera, and we're not talking about his special effects career. Yes, Belleci has also written and directed, which to be fair, came as a side effect for his film school studies. But nevertheless, it's a big enough point of pride that he's included it in the biography on his website.

To date, Belleci's biggest foray into writing and directing is Sand Trooper, a post-apocalyptic short film he made as his senior thesis. The short — which credits him with his full name, Salvatore Belleci, and features some pretty neat rudimentary special effects — takes place in a post-apocalyptic desert where a lone soldier tries to infiltrate a mysterious facility. We won't spoil anything here, but if you ever find yourself in a Mad Max -inspired wasteland, it's probably best to avoid petting mysterious mice. 

Unlike many other celebrities, Tory Belleci appears to be so intensely private that even the most tenacious gossip sites can't seem to agree on anything conclusive about his relationships and other personal matters. Perhaps because of this lack of solid information, sites like Superb Hub and Hollywood Mask mostly address common rumors concerning him, which include claims that he either dates or used to date fellow host Kari Byron (which is untrue, as they're just good friends) or that he's gay. 

Belleci himself doesn't seem to mind keeping personal matters personal. However, he has been known to indulge in the occasional social media post with an apparent girlfriend. One tweet from 2013 seemed to hint that he was involved with Francesca Garigue, a senior production coordinator for MythBusters. More recently, a woman known as Erin B. has posted some fairly romantic imagery about herself and Belleci on Instagram, with one post even revealing the two might be getting married soon. 

Tory Belleci might come across as a pretty great guy in TV, but in his private life, he's been known to take his niceness up to 11. The Monterey County Herald writes that when MythBusters took a brief hiatus in 2010, Belleci decided to spend this no doubt much-needed downtime by taking a trip abroad. Only, instead of taking a luxurious celebrity holiday, he flew to Haiti to do volunteer work. Joining forces with the non-profit LifeGivingForce, Belleci visited orphanages in the country still reeling from the January 12, 2010 earthquake, and he helped local communities gain access to clean, safe water by building water cleaning systems. 

Belleci, who is a Christian, saw this as an opportunity to do missionary work and says that the experience was "overwhelmingly profound." He was extremely impressed with the way the orphanages were aiming to educate the kids and give them an upbringing that would raise them to become key figures in Haiti's future. According to the orphanages, their aim was to "change Haiti" by educating up to 6,000 kids into a "whole generation of leaders," leaders that Belleci was helping provide water for. So yeah, this wasn't exactly your average famous person vacation. But then again, Tory Belleci isn't your average famous person.